Usually, an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client machine detects when a keyword, which a user has been registered previously through a keyboard, occurs in a received message, and notifies the user of the occurrence of the keyword. However, the received message, or the keyword preset by the user, may or may not be useful when the keyword occurs in the received message. Accordingly, it frequently occurs that the message including the keyword, the occurrence of which the user has been notified of, is not worth reading. Unless the useless registered keyword is deleted by the user, the user may be undesirably notified every time a message containing the keyword is received. In order to cope well with changes of the user's necessity, the user must frequently change his or her keyword.
Knowing that the keyword the user has previously registered through a keyboard may be in fact ineffective or may become ineffective to the user later, the inventors have recognized the need for providing facilities to automatically and dynamically register and delete a keyword. They have also recognized the need for reducing unnecessary or annoying notification to the user of reception of messages containing the ineffective keyword. Furthermore, the inventors have recognized the need for assigning different degrees of importance to keywords and notifying the user of reception of messages in a manner determined by the degree of importance given to the respective keywords.
Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide dynamic registration and deletion of keywords, depending on a manner how a user responds to received messages or on the user's status.
Another object of the present invention is to provide assignment of different degrees of importance to keywords dependent on messages the user sends or on the user's status.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide dynamic change of the degrees of importance of the keywords, depending on a manner how a user responds to received messages or on the user's status.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a different audio and/or visual indication for each of received messages depending on the degree of importance given to the keyword associated with that received message.
Other objects of the present invention will be understood from the following description of the present invention.